Earlier this week we posted a Guide to Recommender Systems, as part of our series on recommendation technologies. In this post we look at some of the challenges ...

Earlier this week we posted a Guide to Recommender Systems, as part of our series on recommendation technologies. In this post we look at some of the challenges in building or deploying a recommender system. And yes, Napoleon Dynamite is one of them.

"95% of web users do not read 80% of your content. With these statistics already working against you, how can you improve your content to ensure that readers are getting the best user experience from your site?"

Every website has a bunch of web pages which get more search traffic than others. These pages are constantly visited daily by new visitors, people who have never seen the site in question before. I call these ‘money pages’ because they are a reliable source of immediate and future income.
But they’re not just ‘money’ because they bring in revenue: they are one of the easiest ways to grow your audience without much work. If you learn how to optimize these money pages (its not hard to do), you’ll really improve your website in so many ways. More revenue, more members, more influence and authority. Doesn’t that sound good?

Just to clarify, the use of “steal” and “stole’ is in the sense of “stole the game.” The point of this post is to explain how Google won, and not at all to suggest that they didn’t deserve to win. Google’s success is a direct reflection of how much value they create, i.e. A LOT — they solved a problem in the market that nobody else figure out how to solve or even recognized as the huge opportunity in the market. This post is also intended to help media companies understand better how Google works so that they can better compete in the web content marketplace, not to justify any feelings of “sour grapes.”

"If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web."

Rather than give you a review of the book, which you can find on Amazon, I thought it would be useful to share some ideas and take aways that apply to content creation - the new business of marketing and communications.

This seems to be one of the more interesting topics to come up while I was away. More from Anil Dash and Kottke.

a killer read: HT @gruber

Getting linked from a high-profile website is almost always a huge compliment, well-received by any blogger. But Monday morning, I saw two friends taken by surprise when they were featured on the front page of AllThingsD, the Dow Jones-owned news site edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal. I talked to Kara, as well as several other writers and bloggers, to understand why.

for upcoming post about aggregation, fair use, etc.

Good debate on how work should be quoted, framed & attributed on blogs

According to research, those who download 'free' music are also the industry's largest audience for digital sales

Pretty obvious: the more you get to listen, the more you eventually buy.

Piracy may be the bane of the music industry but according to a new study, it may also be its engine. A report from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don't.
Everybody knows that music sales have continued to fall in recent years, and that filesharing is usually blamed. We are made to imagine legions of internet criminals, their fingers on track-pads, downloading songs via BitTorrent and never paying for anything. One of the only bits of good news amid this doom and gloom is the steady rise in digital music sales. Millions of internet do-gooders, their fingers on track-pads, who pay for songs they like – purchasing them from Amazon or iTunes Music Store. And yet according to Professor Anne-Britt Gran's new research, these two groups may be the same.

Blogs and Twitter have almost eliminated any barrier to publishing. You have an idea and in a few minutes your thoughts can be online. Think about it – with every person thinking about more than 50,000 thoughts a day, producing online content can be simple.
Maybe. But simply churning out meaningless content does not guarantee that others will read what you write. Make this mistake and people will read what you write and write you off.
What’s the alternative?
Use your creativity to generate content that will inspire and transform the lives of the audience in a positive way. Remember that it costs time (and indirectly – money) for your audience to read what you write. And, they expect a good return for that investment.
You will know whether you are succeeding in influencing your audience in a positive way because the audience will tell you. No, maybe not directly but by the way they respond to your content.
So here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content:

"Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness."

Microcopy counts

The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing.

Building websites by hand with all html/css pages was fine a couple years ago, but these days there are a ton of awesome Content Management System options out there that make our jobs as developers and website publishers SO much easier!

Want to get Internet users to visit your Website or follow your brand? The best way to accomplish those tasks, according to ARAnet, based on polling by Opinion Research Corporation, may not be advertising. Compared with banner ads, pop-up ads, e-mail offers and sponsored links, articles that include brand information were most likely to lead US Internet users to read—and act.

Whether you want to keep your kids eyes away from inappropriate content or your employees from wasting time online, you'll find a variety of great tools available for filtering internet access in today's Hive Five.
Photo by Zach Klein.
Last week we asked you to share your favorite method of filtering internet content. While we originally intended to approach the topic from a software angle, it quickly became apparent that software didn't cut it for most people and that the majority of you are using either a combination of desktop software and a proxy server/firewall or just the latter by itself. The following solutions range, in difficultly of installation, from as simple as requiring five minutes to install to as complex as setting up a physical computer as a Linux-based content filter.
DansGuardian (Cross Platform, Free)
One way to measure whether or not Dansguardian is the right filtering tool for you is your willingness to install and tinker with an opera

"Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business. Look at iTunes: if people paid for content, then it would follow that better content would cost more money. But every song costs the same. Why would people pay the same price for goods of (often vastly) different quality? Because they're not paying for the goods they're paying Apple for the service of providing a selection of convenient options easy to pay for and easy to download."

Finding great content online from a social media and search marketer’s standpoint is a very vital aspect to building out ...

Finding great content online from a social media and search marketer’s standpoint is a very vital aspect to building out social accounts, writing blog posts, researching target markets, link acquisition, and blogger outreach. The following 9 sites and mashups are ways to help facilitate the discovery of great content.

a little too long and paginated (argh!) but the guy gets many key points right ... will little Artie Sulz who pays himself $4MM a year bother to read it? ... send to evan ... "(I worked for a household-name news organization whose top web editor told me the design of the site didn’t allow links in text. The assertion raised so many questions in my mind I was rendered speechless. It was almost like a Zen koan; the terrestrial equivalent might be of a newspaper whose pages were all glued together.)" I'M LAUGHING BUT IT'S WORTH A CRY ... "Let’s be honest: These papers deserve to die. " AMEN ... "If I were running a chain of papers, here’s what I’d do:" THE NINE SUGGESTIONS THAT FOLLOW ARE GREAT BUT OF COURSE WILL NEVER HAPPEN

One of the things the digital convergence is doing is exposing that fact. Newspapers have to understand that the value that they could as a consequence offer to advertisers just doesn’t exist any more. Another thing: since that delivery monopoly is gone, you can see how much of the production of the American newspaper was not only promotional, but redundant.

"Press releases contain dated information, the release of which is valuable only to the companies involved; in most cases, they’d actually pay to advertise it, and in that sense it has a negative news value. But vast swaths of a typical American daily is filled with news whose primary source is a press release of one form or another, from entities governmental, political, or corporate. It was part of an unspoken but implicit agreement the papers had with advertisers—that the vast majority of what the paper printed would be complementary with the advertising. (It would be complimentary too, of course.)"

What’s your role? Are you a designer who needs “real copy” for your comps? Maybe you’re an information architect trying to organize an experience, or a search engine marketer eager to influence your client with keywords they’ll actually use. Whatever your role, a content strategist can help you be more successful.

The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style

"At a more thematic level, first working through the 'big issues' of content strategy, like communication goals and messaging, can help you hit the mark in your respective deliverables. "

An excellent analysis of whether people actually pay for content -- a point I've made before. And colleagues look at me like I'm crazy.

"In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either."

"Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying "this will sell a lot of papers!" Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model. The reason they make less money now is that people don't need as much paper. "

When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.

What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content...What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for.
The first is probably the future of most current media. Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts

Web masters constantly search for ways to optimize the way content is presented on their sites. With the advent of terms like “above the fold” it is ever so important to provide eye-catching and functional user interfaces.
In this tutorial we are going to make a slick content slider for a computer shop, with the help of jQuery and the MopSlider plugin. The slider is going to be generated with PHP and we are using a plain txt file as a data source for the notebook configurations.

Christian Muoz-Donoso is going to make this job pay, he's got to move quickly. He has a list of 10 videos to shoot on this warm June morning, for

The result is a factory stamping out moneymaking content. “I call them the Henry Ford of online video,” says Jordan Hoffner, director of content partnerships at YouTube. Media companies like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AOL, and USA Today have either hired Demand or studied its innovations. This year, the privately held Demand is expected to bring in about $200 million in revenue; its most recent round of financing by blue-chip investors valued the company at $1 billion.
In this industrial model of content creation, Muñoz-Donoso is working the conveyor belt — being paid very little for cranking out an endless supply of material. He admits that the results are not particularly rewarding, but work is work, and Demand’s is steady and pays on time. Plus, he says, “this is the future.” He has shot more than 40,000 videos for Demand, filming yo-yo whizzes, pole dancers, and fly fishermen. But ask him to pick a favorite and he’s stumped. “I can’t really remember most of them,” he says.

First, to find out what terms users are searching for, it parses bulk data purchased from search engines, ISPs, and Internet marketing firms (as well as Demands own traffic logs). Then the algorithm crunches keyword rates to calculate how much advertisers will pay to appear on pages that include those terms. (A portion of Demands revenue comes from Google, which allows businesses to bid on phrases that they would like to advertise against.)

Demand Media has created a virtual factory that pumps out 4,000 videoclips and articles a day. It starts with an algorithm.
The algorithm is fed inputs from three sources: Search terms (popular terms from more than 100 sources comprising 2 billion searches a day), the ad market (a snapshot of which keywords are sought after and how much they are fetching), and the competition (whats online already and where a term ranks in search results).

Viral is one of the biggest buzzwords these days in blogging world. Everyone wants to create something viral, so their blog or product will “market itself.”
Despite all the buzz about creating “viral content” and a “viral blog,” not many people really understand how this is done. I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure I’ve got it all figured out. There aren’t really any secrets. But, there are a lot of little tactics that can add up to creating something contagious.

During a rebuild or development of a new site, content strategy engagement is site-level and long-term. First, the content strategist assesses, analyzes, and recommends high-level steps to create more cohesive content. In practice, this means many working sessions with business owners to define big picture objectives, the mission, and editorial program for the site based on the initial content assessment. Once the site goals are understood from a business and user point of view, the content strategist-as-curator works to reframe the collection by creating an overarching strategy that defines how content be should be organized, positioned, and made relevant (think: exhibition rooms in a museum or gallery). We then look at the spectrum of what is available and desired for publication, identify what is premium (the most unique among competitors, desirable to users, and drives high traffic) and work with the business to agree on site-wide topical areas of strength, focus and breadth.

What can we learn from museums libraries and other institutions that manage collections about effective content strategies.

These Niche CMSs can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to build your website, and provide many features that you’d like but wouldn’t have the time to build yourself. Some are hosted solutions to completly take the pain of setting up your site, whilst others are applications you download and install on your own server.

Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.

For our part, we throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction. And the aggregators like TechMeme can figure out who broke the news. Page views are lost, but reputation is gained.

Michael Arrington/TechCrunch, Dec. 13, 2009.

"On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.
These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.
We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks."

"the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines."

It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.
So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents ...

Last week the BBC announced it was to start optimising its headlines in an attempt to gain greater visibility in the search engine results pages, so I thought I’d take a look at journalism and the web.
Over recent years, many online news providers have had to adopt search engine optimisation (SEO) best practice into their articles in order to maintain their audience figures.
Yet I often see journalists and even some bloggers bemoaning the need to optimise their work, as though it means all the quality has been drained out of the article and replaced with Google-appeasing nonsense.
That’s why the first of my points is perhaps the most important. As long as it’s done well, SEO will not make your articles unreadable.
SEO is not the enemy of good writing
Believe it or not, the purpose of SEO is not to destroy your writing’s artistic integrity, it’s to make sure people can actually find your work to appreciate its genius.
I think that SEO is often misunderstood by profe

30.nov.09

That’s why the first of my points is perhaps the most important. As long as it’s done well, SEO will not make your articles unreadable.

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.
Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations.
"How these online payment models work and how much revenue they can generate is still up in the air," Barber said in a speech at at a Media Standards Trust event at the British Academy last night.
"But I confidently predict that within the next 12 months, almost all news organisations will be charging for content."

Point de vue du Financial Times sur l'évolution de l'actualité payante

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations.

Without an ordered approach, careful research and custom tools it can be difficult for link builders, writers and content strategists to know what content will attract links in a target market. This article provides a process and tools for developing and distributing linkable content based on the content that's proven to attract links in your target keyword space.

Many copywriting and marketing gurus teach simplistic ideas about psychology. They insist that people can be fully understood and manipulated ...

People are highly complex and often mysterious, so we all struggle to understand our fellow humans. However, now that you’ve gotten over being afraid to sell, here are a few basic psychological tidbits that can help you write compelling copy.

The news media experimenters of 2009 will be upping the ante in 2010 with new storytelling and social engagement strategies. Here are the top trends to watch for.

The news media is experiencing a renaissance. As we end the year, its state in 2009 can be summarized as a year of turmoil, layoffs and cutbacks in an industry desperately seeking to reinvent its business model and content. But despite the thousands of journalism jobs lost, the future has much hope and opportunity for those that are willing to adapt to a changing industry.

Users do not commonly browse the internet looking for a good design or decent user experience. Users browse the web in search of good content.
When it comes to designing a website, content is often overlooked, but why? Very rarely do users browse the web looking for a good design or decent experience. Users come for the content. Not giving them what they want with poorly written content will frustrate users. Not only does it waste their time, but your time as well.

When it comes to designing a website, content is often overlooked, but why? Very rarely do users browse the web looking for a good design or decent experience. Users come for the content. Not giving them what they want with poorly written content will frustrate users. Not only does it waste their time, but your time as well.

If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I'd do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I'd do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.

Great article on local media.

"If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything... I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them"

Smart businesses like 37 Signals, Whole Foods and, to a lesser extent, Craigie on Main, are beginning to produce content that’s less about their product and more about topics that their customers gravitate to.

Smart businesses like 37 Signals and Whole Foods are producing content that's less about their product and more about topics that their customers gravitate to.

Mostly saving this for myself, but Warren had a great post talking about online pay models - and why even a universally adopted pay wall is a bad idea.

Isn't this collusion? A bunch of different newspaper to gather together and discuss monetization? http://bit.ly/6fwTW [from http://twitter.com/JMaultasch/statuses/1963825631]

"Executive recruiters likely do not swarm the industry for talent; certainly not in the same way they've gone after leaders at companies such as General Electric, Wells Fargo Bank or Microsoft over the years. Indeed, the June issue of Fast Company, a very sharp tech and business publication, features a cover story on "The 100 Most Creative People in Business."
Perhaps I missed it but I don't think I saw a single newspaper executive mentioned.
Why not? Now, more than ever, is a time for creativity and nerve, not just hunkering down and crossing fingers that safe harbor will appear on the horizon. It's a wonderful and important product, vital to American communities. Unlike a lot of jobs, you can look yourself in the mirror and know you're doing some good. Many newsrooms remain filled with a sense of mission even amid the looming dread.

"Models to Monetize Content" is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O'Hare International Airport. It's perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves. /.../
There's no mention on its website but the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, has assembled top executives of the New York Times, Gannett, E. W. Scripps, Advance Publications, McClatchy, Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, the Associated Press, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Lee Enterprises and Freedom Communication Inc., among more than two dozen in all.
Ultimately, many in attendance will start charging for some online content because they don't know what else to do.

"Models to Monetize Content" is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O'Hare International Airport. It's perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves.
There's no mention on its website but the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, has assembled top executives of the New York Times, Gannett, E. W. Scripps, Advance Publications, McClatchy, Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, the Associated Press, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Lee Enterprises and Freedom Communication Inc., among more than two dozen in all. A longtime industry chum, consultant Barbara Cohen, "will facilitate the meeting."

Here's a story the newspaper industry's upper echelon apparently kept from its anxious newsrooms: A discreet Thursday meeting in Chicago about their future.
"Models to Monetize Content" is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O'Hare International Airport. It's perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves.

Access point to all the Pennsylvania State Board of Education's "State Academic Standards" -- scroll down to find PDF and MS-Word versions of the standards for "Environment & Ecology" and "Science & Technology"

This article hypothesis about the long term impacts of user generated web content on greater society, and the many professional facets within society (albeit within an American context). Stills discusses how user generated content can only increase in size and rapidity, as new media platforms continue to increase in size and rapidity. He also discusses how platforms such as the internet have allowed for a liberation of free speech and communication amongst individuals, whereas 10 years ago there were limited avenues to get your opinion heard. This article provides an interesting insight into the phenomenon of user generated content and how pervasive it has actually become.

Every day, user-generated content (UGC) is part of the online experience of millions of US Internet users. From entertainment to communications to e-commerce, consumers are taking charge of the creation, distribution and consumption of digital content.
And it’s growing.
Up from 83 million in 2008, eMarketer estimates the number of UGC creators will grow to 115 million in 2013.

News organizations should think outside the browser similarly to how iTunes, the Times Reader, and the Kindle do in order to create a stand-alone boutique environment for information consumption that users would more naturally pay for.

Nearly every company relies on the written word to woo customers. So why is most business writing so numbingly banal?

One of my favorite phrases in the business world is full-service solutions provider. A quick search on Google finds at least 47,000 companies using that one. That's full-service generic. There's more. Cost effective end-to-end solutions brings you about 95,000 results. Provider of value-added services nets you more than 600,000 matches. Exactly which services are sold as not adding value?
Who writes this stuff? Worse, who reads it and approves it? What does it say when tens of thousands of companies are saying the same things about themselves?

One of the hallmarks of social media is content: creating it, sharing it and engaging with it.
The best content in social media inspires, informs, educates or entertains (and if you’re really lucky, it does all four!). But how do you create content that goes viral?
What follows are seven strategies you can employ to help your content succeed.

Among the hallmarks associated with social media will be articles: creating the idea, sharing it along with getting from it. What follows are more effective strategies it is possible to use to help your articles do well.

7 Ways to Use Psychological Influence With Social Media Content

Social media marketing with content created on the convergence of neuroscience, human psychology and group dynamics.

Let’s say you wanted to make a website where clicking buttons in the nav would dynamically load some content. Kind of like the organic tabs thing, only the content is loaded dynamically. Say something like this:
There is no excuse for the navigation of a website to be completely broken without JavaScript enabled. So the best approach here is just to create these pages and the navigation as plain ol’ semantic HTML. You know, like it’s 2001.
The navigation links to the files that contain that content, and are fully formed functional pages on their own.

"One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. " / "The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.
The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win."

Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.
The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.
The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win.

"The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win." - think about this

The idea that people won't pay for content online has become such a part of the Web orthodoxy that New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller risked getting lynched earlier this month for merely musing about paid models for the online editions of his paper. Not helping Keller's cogitation was a contemporaneous "secret memo" from Steve Brill and a Time article by Walter Isaacson, both which advocated variations on the micropayment model. Neither advances the topic much beyond what most Web entrepreneurs understood long ago.

What content will people pay for? Beautifully designed, irreplaceable and authoritative.

As someone said to me a few weeks back: "Andy Warhol was wrong. We're not going to be famous for 15 minutes. We're each going to be famous for 15 People." Indeed.
Advertising: We're standing at the end of an era. "Mass Media", the ability to reach large segments of the population with a single message is essentially over. For advertisers, the need to find content in context, and to have that context be appropriate for their message and their brand is critical. So, Curation replaces Creation as the coin of the realm for advertiser-safe environments. No longer can advertisers simply default to big destination sites. The audience is too diffuse and the need to filter and organize quality crowd-created content is too critical.

Remember when mom always told you to eat your vegetables? Little did you know she was giving you fantastic advice for managing your Web strategy. In these days of Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs and more, it can be tempting to skip over the basics and dive headfirst into an oh-so-tempting dish of social media or SEO "tricks."
Businesses of all sizes are pigging out on social media without putting an equal amount of effort into forging a solid foundation built on a user-friendly Web experience and great content.
To deliver a site that gives users the experience they are looking for, we need to set it upon a solid foundation of content, usable navigation, and strong SEO practices.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at what I call the "The Web Strategy Pyramid" (a tip of the hat to the FDA’s Food Pyramid for the inspiration).

Modern websites and applications are more dynamic than old style web pages, with several pieces of well-placed JavaScript providing smoother content updates, more intuitive user feedback and more responsive controls. One very common feature is the expanding/collapsing or shown/hidden box, whether this is a tabbed interface, a content "tray" on the side that can be slid out and then put away again, or a complex tree menu with expanding/collapsing sub-menus.
Generally, these features are implemented via JavaScript, however using CSS3 it is possible to create such content using only HTML and CSS — no JavaScript required. In this article I'll show you how this works, including a few examples to get you started.

Setting sail on the content management sea? Well here’s a navigational chart that’ll help avoid the ragged rocks and hidden shoals. Don’t leave shore without it!

Knowing in advance what the CMS is going to be used for is critical to selecting the correct one. And the use of content on the web is extraordinarily varied. Consequently so are the content management systems that are out there. Let’s start with some simpler ones.
There are two main types of website. Most larger websites are dynamic websites where, after receiving a request from a user, generate the HTML on the fly. For these you need to have your CMS embedded on the server side. But simpler websites, ones that have static HTML documents can have their content managed by much simpler CMS’. And some of the simplest CMS’ out there are entirely web based.

As most of you already know, Wordpress 3.0 has been released. Although it’s still in a beta release stage, you can take it for a test drive and check out the many new features that are available. Many people already use Wordpress for many things other than just blogging but this release will certainly create opportunities for managing content even more effortlessly than before and using Wordpress as more than just a blog.

Consistently publishing content requires that we deal with a foe known as content management. Content management is just what it sounds like: a way to manage the creation and dissemination of content. To systematically do that, it’s imperative that publishers employ what’s (aptly) known as content management systems (CMSs). The most common of kind of which is called a blog.

Complete Beginner’s Guide to Content Strategy

“If [Information Architecture] is the spatial side of information, I see content strategy as the temporal side of the same coin.” - Louis Rosenfeld

WordPress shortcode API is a powerful function which was introduced from version 2.5, it’s just a simple set of functions for creating macro codes in post content. If you’ve developed a Vbulletin forum before, you would have been familiar with the shortcode (something called BBCode) but the WordPress users maybe not. In this article, I would like to show you how to create and use shortcodes, in addition, I will show you some creative examples of using shortcode in WordPress blog.

WordPress shortcode API is a powerful function which was introduced from version 2.5, it’s just a simple set of functions for creating macro codes in post content.

Twitter and backchanneling sessions only capture information for finite periods of time. This site will be used to store all of the great links and resources discovered through ISTE 2010 (Jun 27-30, 2010).